THQ and Obsidian are collaborating to make a South Park role-playing game for the Xbox 360, PS3, and Windows PC. The picture above (reversed version after the jump) comes courtesy of Game Informer, who have an article on the game and an interview with Trey Parker and Matt Stone in their January issue (out this Thursday). Here’s what we know about the game so far:

“South Park: The Game” lets you play as a new kid in South Park, befriending the well-known characters and protecting the town.

Parker and Stone are writing the script, performing the dialogue, and overseeing the development of the game, making this the first South Park game they’ve had an active role in making.

The current plan is to release the game in the second half of 2012.

A tipster at NeoGAF claims to have an advance copy of the magazine and released these unconfirmed details:

The player’s character will be silent and “fully customizable”.

The player “has a smartphone that acts as the primary game menu and has a facebook-like app show the number of friends you have and your current standing with the various kid factions.”

“Eric Cartman will greet your character and help you decide your class, which are wizard, paladin, adventurer, rogue, and a fifth unconventional class made up by Cartman.” I’m going to take a wild guess that the fifth class Cartman would make up is “Jew”.

“Obsidian is using the Dungeon Siege III engine.”

“Many elements of the combat system are like Paper Mario and the Mario & Luigi games.”

“There is a Final Fantasy Materia like system in the game to augment weapons with various abilities like fire, poison, and electricity.”

“Parker and Stone gave Obsidian 15 years of assets used during the show and a detailed list of approved textures and colors.”

“Critical hits, cash rewards, experience, and consumables are in the game.”

“Sodas are health potions and Tweak’s coffee is a haste item.”

There will probably be no unskippable cutscenes because Parker hates them (as well he should).

@JAFO – Yeah, I have little doubt it will be a cool game eventually after some patches. Obsidian has a long standing tradition of making good games that are buggy or even broken at launch. Obviously Fallout: New Vegas was a good example (that was had the double whammy of being published by Bethesda, which is another company famous for good but buggy games). The worst offender was Neverwinter Nights 2. That game was all types of bugged when it first came out then for about 3 or 4 years it went through a sadistic cycle of playable, somewhat playable, thoroughly broken, playable again as Obsidian issued about a billion patches which would fix one thing and break three others. Then just as the game would get playable they would put out an expansion that would break the original game, and I mean main story showstopper bugs, then after a while they would get it all patched, then they released another expansion which began the cycle of breakage yet again. It was maddening. Every time a patch came out it was like playing Russian Roulette. Too bad because there’s a good game underneath all that breakage.

I actually liked the SP shooter game they had back when. It was really fun, maybe not an actual GOOD game, but it was really fun, especially playing multiplayer with friends and using the cow launcher.